


your own private prison

by bloodsweatspit



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cigarettes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 02:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30132459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodsweatspit/pseuds/bloodsweatspit
Summary: Alston goes Elsewhere.(cw alcoholism, smoking)
Kudos: 7
Collections: Canada Moist Talkers Fanfiction





	your own private prison

Alston doesn’t mean to get swept away. He knows how rough it is on everyone left behind, comforted Ziwa in their agony during the long weeks Eugenia was gone. Suffered himself while Cedric was away, and through the slow re-gathering of his internal pieces upon return. Alston doesn’t want to do that. He never, ever wants to hurt anyone, not even on accident. He’s done that enough in his life already.

But that’s the problem with a life spent drinking the days away. Things just... rush up at you. Obligations, opportunities, big waves of immateria. They knock your feet out from under you and leave you on your back, carried away to somewhere you didn’t mean to go and have ended up anyway. Like Elsewhere.

Alston’s Elsewhere doesn’t feel like anywhere special or different. It looks just like his old apartment in Philly, the one he lived in before he was recruited for the Pies, with the high ceilings and the stainless steel double-wide fridge. He opens the fridge out of habit and finds it stocked exactly as he’d kept it: beers for guests, a couple bottles of white wine for the same, some blocks of hard cheese and deli slices of salami to eat with his hands when he wakes up at four AM with a pounding headache and a growling stomach. A lot of citrus juice. Ice in the freezer with a bottle of vodka.

He takes a glass down from the cabinet and mixes himself a drink. God, it’s such a familiar rhythm, deeper in his bones than his familiarity with the game he plays all day. He could get lobotomized and still pour himself a cocktail.

The balcony is the same, too: high up enough that the people on the streets below can’t see his face, can’t smell the smoke from his cigarettes. Up here he can - and has many times - pass entire days or weeks alone, smoking and drinking. The cigarettes dry and foul his mouth, so he sips his drink; the drink leaves fumes on his breath, so he lights another cigarette to make them disappear. A little self-perpetuating spiral down towards oblivion.

Alston lets himself slide down that spiral, farther into Elsewhere, into his only forever home. It’s not that he doesn’t want to go back. He does. He _really_ , really does. But not just yet. He’ll go back tomorrow. He swears it to himself, pretending he doesn’t know that tomorrow he’ll be farther down in the hole, swearing he’ll make the longer climb the day after that. A chain of broken promises to himself, stretching forward into a gray infinity.

**Author's Note:**

> If this resonated with you, please know that I love you and you’re not alone. I’m on Discord as VCP#6028 and my DMs are always open for anyone who wants to talk about addiction.


End file.
